Early this year,  our founder Valentine Gandhi, visiting Helsinki to explore options for payment mechanisms to refugees as part of Project – I AM.

Project I AM is refugeefugee skill building project initiated by The Development CAFE as a Research For Development Project. The project undertakes skill gap assessment of refugees, trains them in required skill sets and connects with potential digital jobs through portals as well as directly to companies. Payment to refugees are difficult owing to the laws of respective countries, and especially in those that are not signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention.

An article in the MIT Technology Review, highlighted MONI a tech startup based in Helsinki and how they were piloting payments to refugees through payments through a Mastercard Debit Card system. Read this article.

This sparked our interest and we visited MONI offices to learn their model and to explore options that can be applied in Project I AM. At the moment Project I AM is in pilot stage in Indonesia and here the refugees are mostly trained in the skill sets, but

we are partnering with NGOS in Europe to apply our model and MONI’s debit cards can be of great use to our refugee partners.

If you have a payment solution for refugees, or are a company that wishes to hire refugees, get in touch with us.

Here are some reasons why hiring a refugee is smart business choice. 

If you are a US based company, get in touch with We Hire Refugees. We support their cause!